Talk:Alli Bhandari/@comment-5390364-20140112044524
For the longest time, I’d always been mystified by Alli’s character. How could she be on the show for so long and grow so little? How has she gone through the trials and tribulations of multiple relationships, and yet she is still willing to accept being physically abused by Leo? I’ve been thinking about it, and then I realized just how much depth her character has. Alli is unable to validate her own existence. How could she? She was never given the tools to nurture her self-worth in the critical growth period of childhood and adolescence. From an early age, her family’s strict abidance to its Islamic Indian culture forced her to repress her true personality in order to mold her into the conservative, milquetoast female archetype that is just completely archaic and bound to lead to social isolation in modern-day Canada. She was taught that opposing her autocratic father’s will or straying from the basic tenements of her religion would lead her parents to view her as impure or a disgrace. From this, it is reasonable to extrapolate that Alli, especially with her incredibly logical mind, could never accept that her parents truly loved her. How could they love her if they never knew her? Blood ties alone do not promise love. And worse yet, if they ever came to discover the real Alli, they would reject her. Imagine the self-loathing that must result from that fear. This is even further elucidated by Alli’s initial dismissal of Drew in You Don’t Know My Name because he was unable to provide any reason as to why he was attracted to her. Although her parents finally proved that their love for her was unconditional in Hide and Seek, the damage to her own self-perception wrought from a lifetime of repression was already done. Compounded with her already weak self-esteem, her first boyfriend was ashamed to even be seen with her in public, and her next two cheated on her. Needless to say, the act of cheating insinuates that Drew’s own hedonism was worth ruining his relationship with her over, and that Dave, if only in the heat of the moment, deemed Alli to be of lesser value to Jacinta. In her mind, she must have been led to believe herself to be undesirable at best, if not completely worthless. Her relationships inevitably fail, but paradoxically enough, it is from men that she seeks the love and validation that she cannot give herself. It is incredibly telling that she impulsively kissed both KC and Jake after enduring devastating blows to her self-esteem (her irrationally perceived inferiority to Clare, and being cheated on, respectively). Hell, she even expressed ''reassurance/comfort ''when Owen offered to pay to have sex with her. Her problem is far more profound than her oft-stated “trust issues”: it is total self-hatred. And now she is willing to believe it is her fault that Leo hits her. And it is so, so frustrating to watch, because Alli literally has all of the potential in the world. She has everything going for her. She is society’s perfect package; she is entrancingly beautiful, absolutely brilliant, and her personality is highly desirable as well. I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald that stated, “In the end, we are all just humans… drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness”. This is something she can't possibly resolve during her tenure at Degrassi. God, what a tragic character.